Gacutil fails to register a dll and fails silently

Me and the DBA were rolling out quite a sizeable deployment into production. We were about half way through our deployment checklist (also known as the runbook). It was going well, too well in fact. We’d had no issues and everything was incredibly smooth.

Of course there shouldn’t really be any issues, as by this point, deployments (hopefully automated) to test environments and pre-prod/UAT will have happened along with the runbook documented and approved with all relevant team members and Change Manager(s).

So, I’d deployed out some of the apps as part of the product rollout. I moved on to some SSIS components that are doing some fairly sizeable file processing and number crunching along with many transforms. Myself and another Senior Developer had written a class library that was referenced by the SSIS components. The class library needed registering in the GAC. Not an issue, I’d copied the gacutil command and the dlls required for registering into a folder as part of the deployment pack. On the production server I cracked up the cmd prompt with Admin rights and issued the following:-

gacutil /i CompanyName.Library.dll

And nothing, well we had a response from gacutil which gave us the gactuil .net version and the command prompt. No error, great move on, but I noticed I’d not seen an “… installed” message. Confused I checked the Gac and sure enough the library was missing.

Hmmmm, this is strange. Had I inadvertently build the DLL targeting the wrong .Net Framework (that’s pretty amateur!)?Back to my DEV VM and I checked the framework. No it’s fine so what gives??

The Gacutil MSDN page doesn’t offer anything else apart from what I already know. After a quick stackoverflow search and google nothing was really giving me any clues. The release schedule window was ticking away and I was running out of ideas.

Luckily, a colleague had done something similar just mere weeks ago. Having chatted to him he mentioned something about the 1033 folder and a further dependency DLL residing in said folder. Once you have the other dll in the folder and gacutil issuing the command again gives you the install message and all is good with the world!